Networks such as the Internet have become the predominant medium for the delivery of digital content and media related services. The emergence of standard web services protocols promises to accelerate this trend, enabling companies to provide services that can interoperate across multiple software platforms and support cooperation between business services and consumers via standardized mechanisms.
Yet, significant barriers exist to the goal of an interoperable and secure world of media-related services. For example, multiple, overlapping de facto and formal standards can actually inhibit straightforward interoperability by forcing different implementations to choose between marginally standard, but otherwise incompatible, alternative technical approaches to addressing the same basic interoperability or interconnection problems. In some cases these incompatibilities are due to problems that arise from trying to integrate different generations of technologies, while in other cases the problems are due to market choices made by different parties operating at the same time but in different locales and with different requirements. Thus, despite standardization, it is often difficult to locate, connect to, and interact with devices that provide needed services. And there are frequently incompatibility issues between different trust and protection models.
While emerging web service standards such as WSDL (Web Services Description Language) are beginning to address some of these issues for Internet-facing systems, such approaches are incomplete. They fail to address these issues across multiple network tiers spanning personal and local area networks; home, enterprise, and department gateways; and wide area networks. Nor do they adequately address the need for interoperability based on dynamic orchestration of both simple and complex services using a variety of service interface bindings (e.g., CORBA, WS-I, Java RMI, DCOM, C function invocation, Net, etc.), thus limiting the ability to integrate many legacy applications. The advent of widely deployed and adopted peer-to-peer (P2P) applications and networks further compounds the challenges of creating interoperable media-related services, due in part to the fact that there is no unified notion of how to represent and enforce usage rights on digital content.